Slate announced Tuesday that its hit podcast “Slow Burn” will return with a third season, this time exploring the murders of two American music icons: rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace, better known as the Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls.
In its first two seasons, the award-winning podcast dug into other major scandals that captivated national attention in their time: former President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal in the 1970s and former President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s.
The third season, to launch later this year, will investigate the still unsolved murders of Shakur in 1996 and Biggie in 1997. Speculation and conspiracy theories have run rampant in popular culture since the shooting deaths of the two rap stars and rivals, each of which was at the forefront of the hip-hop scene on their respective coasts: East Coast in the case of Biggie in New York and West Coast in the case of Shakur in Los Angeles.
Shakur died in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, and Biggie was shot and killed months later as he was leaving a music industry party in Los Angeles.
After the previous host of “Slow Burn,” Leon Neyfakh, left Slate last year, the company hired journalist Joel Anderson, formerly of ESPN and BuzzFeed News, as the new host for Season 3.
“It’s almost surreal to have this chance to dig more deeply into the lives of the artists and people who influenced my generation and the music that was the soundtrack of much of my own life,” Anderson said in a news release from Slate.
Previous seasons’ episodes of “Slow Burn” were downloaded more than 15 million times, and the show won a National Magazine Award and a Webby Award.